Category: Lebanon

Apple has acknowledged the recent terrorism attacks in Paris with a commemorative ribbon on the Apple France homepage, www.apple.com/fr. The black ribbon is a sign of remembrance and mourning; Google has also added the symbol to its homepage in response to the attacks.

In addition, Apple has been contacting affected employees in French Apple retail stores to check they are safe.

Google has made calls to France via its Hangouts service temporarily free. Callers can use the Hangouts app on Android, iOS, and the web to place calls to the country without incurring the normal international charges. The Google+ post making the announcement did not specify any particular countries, so presumably free calls are available from any location where Hangouts can be used. It’s not clear if Google Voice users are also being given free calls.

In the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks on Friday, many with loved ones living in the city received a new type of notification from Facebook. The social network activated a relatively new tool called Safety Check for the attacks, letting people in Paris easily tell their friends and that they were safe.
While the feature has been helpful for many, some pointed to its use in Paris but not for other recent attacks — like a twin suicide bombing that killed over 40 in Beiruit on Thursday — as yet another example of western bias that apparently values certain lives more than others.

On Saturday, Facebook saw fit to respond to those accusations in a blog post written by the company’s vice president of growth, Alex Schultz. In it, Schultz notes that this is the first time the company has enabled Safety Check for anything other than a natural disaster, events which the tool was originally designed for when it was released last year.

Like a natural disaster, he notes, during the attacks “Facebook became a place where people were sharing information and looking to understand the condition of their loved ones.” After discussing with Facebook employees on the ground, the company decided it was a good idea to turn on Safety Check. “There has to be a first time for trying something new, even in complex and sensitive times, and for us that was Paris.”

Now that Facebook has set a precedent for using Safety Check for terrorism and other violent events, it will need to figure out when and where to use the feature. From Schultz’s comments, it’s not clear if the team would have enabled it for Beruit. He includes the Lebanese city among “other parts of the world, where violence is more common and terrible things happen with distressing frequency. ” And he notes that “During an ongoing crisis, like war or epidemic, Safety Check in its current form is not that useful for people: because there isn’t a clear start or end point and, unfortunately, it’s impossible to know when someone is truly ‘safe.'”

That said, Schultz writes that “We want this tool to be available whenever and wherever it can help,” adding, “We will learn a lot from feedback on this launch.”

MBC2 is the first 24-hour free-to-air movie channel in the Arab World. The Channel offers a wide variety of top international and Hollywood movies.

A couple of years ago, the channel got a new “Theme” – if we can call it like that – alongside its Commercial Break segment song, and it was a real PAIN since then! The video below describes the moment:

And it was really the case, no matter what genre of movies was aired, the same Commercial segment song was played over and over like every 10 to 15 minutes.

Finally, MBC2 has turned this into a new SILENT blue animated dots (similar to the pic above), and it will play a nice song when the break is over showing the name and picture of the movie as the illustration demonstrates below:

Apple has released iOS 9.2 as a Public Beta, and one of the features alongside the bug fixes and installed extensions for safari tabs in third party apps, is that Siri now understands the Arabic Language and it replies in Arabic too!

Here’s a video that demonstrate this feature:

The final version of iOS 9.1 was only sent out to the public last week, so you should probably expect a few more betas before iOS 9.2 is finished.